MeenaKrishnamsetty

MattDoiron

Hedge funds and other major investors are required to publicly file 13F filings within six to seven weeks after the end of a quarter. This provides the investing public with a relatively in-depth view of what a fund owns, though the picks are somewhat stale. While it isn't a good idea to blindly follow any fund, we think that these filings can be a good source of free investment ideas from money managers that retail investors can then go on to research if they like what they see. Gardner Russo & Gardner, whose capital is mostly managed by Tom Russo, has already filed its 13F for the end of December. Read on for our quick take on five of the fund's top stock picks for 2013 and compare them to previous filings.

Gardner Russo & Gardner's top stock pick was Berkshire Hathaway , with about 4,600 of the holding company's Class A shares and a large position in the Class B shares as well. Apparently Russo is confident enough in Warren Buffett's investing prowess that he feels that Berkshire should have a prime place in any true value investor's portfolio (see Buffett's stock picks). Berkshire Hathaway trades at a premium to the book value of its equity, with a P/B ratio of 1.3. Our primary concern about the company concerns whether Buffett's successors will be able to perform at a similar level.

Philip Morris
PM, -1.99%
was another top pick as the fund owned about 8 million shares at the beginning of 2013, up from 7.7 million shares three months earlier. The cigarette company pays a dividend yield of almost 4%, and has an excellent record of paying dividends over time. The stock trades at 15 times consensus earnings for 2013. Billionaire Ken Fisher's Fisher Asset Management added shares of Philip Morris to its portfolio in the third quarter of 2012 and closed September with a position of 5.4 million shares (check out more stocks Fisher was buying). We think that it and other cigarette companies are worthwhile options for income investors.

The fund slightly increased the size of its position in MasterCard
MA, -1.46%
to a total of about 890,000 shares. Analysts expect considerable earnings growth at MasterCard in 2013, with the result being a current-year P/E multiple of 20. However, we think that credit card companies such as Discover Financial Services
DFS, -0.77%
or Capital One
COF, -0.48%
might be better values given their considerably lower earnings multiples. Renaissance Technologies, founded by billionaire Jim Simons, was another fund which reported a large stake in MasterCard for Q3 2012 (find Renaissance's favorite stocks).

Gardner Russo & Gardner didn't only invest in Berkshire, they also invested separately in one of Buffett's top picks: Wells Fargo
WFC, -0.68%
reporting a position of almost 12 million shares. Wells Fargo is seen as a relatively stable bank and so it trades at a premium to book value with a P/B ratio of 1.3. However, the company has been very strong in terms of monetizing its assets: the same valuation is only 10 times its trailing earnings, and in the fourth quarter of 2012 earnings increased 24% from a year earlier. Wells Fargo was one of the most popular stocks among hedge funds in the third quarter of last year (see the full top 10 list).

Russo and his team owned about 4 million shares of Anheuser-Busch
BUD, -1.33%
making the brewer another of their favorite stocks. Lee Ainslie's Maverick Capital had been buying the stock between July and September. Anheuser-Busch is up 49% in the last year, which has brought it to a multiple of 18 times expected earnings for 2013. In Q3 2012 net income was up 16% from its levels in the same period in 2011. It might be worth looking into the sources of that growth- sales growth wasn't nearly as high- to see if the company can sustain that performance.

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